The Brunel Museum
The Brunel Museum is just a short walk from Rotherhithe on the East London Line and is well-signposted from there.
The Brunel Museum
It is a small museum with some good displays about Isambard Brunel and his often forgotten father, Marc. It is well worth the entrance fee of £2.
One of my most favourite books is the biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
The Car of the Future?
Gordon Murray is one of the most innovative car designers of the past few decades, famous for racing and sports cars. So what do you get if he turns his mind to designing a car for everyone?
You get this!
It just goes to show what happens, when you throw convention out of the window, and think about what people really what. Whether they can be convinced they need it, is another matter! But give people good design and they usually like it!
But as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door!”
Boxing Clever
Boxing Clever is the title of two articles in September’s edition of Modern Railways magazine. They detail the works being done to upgrade the major freight lines of Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Southampton to Birmingham, so that they can take the larger 9 ft 6 in high containers (boxes) from the ports to and from industrial centres. In times of austerity and climate change, it is interesting to see how these projects which will cut out hundreds of thousands of lorry journeys are being carried out and managed using some very innovative solutions. So much so,m that it appears that the second project might be £10m under its £70.7m budget.
It is an example of very good project management and shows how by spending money wisely to remove freight bottle-necks is to the good of us all. You could argue for instance that Felixstowe to Nuneaton enhancement might be the equivalent of adding extra capacity to the A14, which is a road, that really can’t be widened too easily, as the Orwell bridge was only built for two lanes each way.
I particularly liked the way that the 1847 Southampton Tunnel was made larger. Rather than use the traditional approach and closing the tunnel for two to three months, as they did when they upgraded Ipswich Tunnel, they did it a track at a time closing for only three weekends and over Christmas 2009, saving a year on the project.
It is my belief that we can save a lot of money on infrastructure projects, like roads, railways, hospitals ands schools by thinking things through with a great deal more innovation, enterprise and by borrowing good and proven ideas and methods from other countries and industries.
New Readers
I was given a write-up in the Ipswich Town program today and some people who visit, may have been directed from the program.
Don’t take anything I say too seriously, as underneath it all I try to amuse and inform. Remember too, I have other interests outside Ipswich Town, like art, architecture, engineering and trains. I also feel that one of the ways we’re going to get this country out of the mess it’s in, is by appreciating what we’ve got here in these Isles and enjoying it. Who would have thought that a visit to Middlesbrough or Crewe could be so enjoyable. But they genuinely were and I shall be visiting other places in the next few months, that might be equally unpromising. Hopefully, they’ll be equally enjoyable, even if Town don’t win or the trip has nothing to do with football.
The next trips will be Portsmouth and Scunthorpe.
Feel free to post comments. I reserve the right to remove those that are not constructive!
Chester’s Hydro-Electric Power Station
Ever since I first went to Chester and saw it on the Dee, I’ve always wondered about the hydro-electric power station by the bridge.
As you can see from these pictures it is not in use to gnerate power anymore,m but there is still the weir to funnel water through the sluices and turbines.
The weir which was built in the eleventh century isa Grade 1 Listed building and it might appear according to Wikipedia that they may be using the river to generate power again. The site certainly needs some restoration as the photos show.
Ipswich’s New Bridge
I noted in my piece on Temenos, that Ipswich hadn’t built any new structures like bridges in recent years. I was wrong, as Ipswich now has a new bridge over the Gipping named after Sir Bobby Robson.
The Sir Bobby Robson Bridge, Ipswich
The Tees Bridges and Barrage
Although the bridges across the Tees at Middlesbrough, are not as numerous as those across the Tyne at Newcastle, they are more impressive and also include a unique flood protection barrier.
Travelling down the river fropm the mouth pf the River Tees, the bridges are as follows
The Transporter Bridge is one of the most unusual, unique and impressive bridges in England.
Foot Passengers on the Transporter Bridge
On Saturday, the bridge was closed, but they were still allowing foot passengers to cross over in the gondola slung from the bridge. A scene from Billy Elliot was shot in the gondola. So we just took a few photos and moved on.
It could be argued that the Newport Bridge is just as unique as its more famous brother. It is a vertical lift bridge and only one of four in the United Kingdom.
The Newport Lifting Bridge
The bridge is no longer raised, as large ships rarely go past it these days. It must have been a marvellous sight to see it being raised.
The Tees Barrier is many things to different people; a road and foot bridge, a white water canoe slalom course, a flood barrier a barge lock and even a test facility for turbines and a fish ladder to allow salmon to pass upstream.
The Tees Barrage
I liked the barrier a lot. It just shows how if you use your imagination, you can create something that serves a number of purposes well.
The Infinity Bridge was the last one we saw and is a foot and cycle bridge in a very clean design.
The Infinity Bridge
All of these bridges can be visited by just walking. There is a detailed walk on the AA’s web site.
Panorama on the Gulf Oil Spill
A fascinating program, which probably asked more questions than it answered.
I’ve worked on some fairly dangerous chemical plants and you always put safety first, last and at every place in between. You might be lucky taking a short cut, but can you live at peace with yourself, if that short-cut proves to be fatal for others? I couldn’t!
So when doubts are raised about the working state of the blow-out protector by an engineer and it would seem these warning are ignored by BP and Transocean, I raise my engineer’s head in despair.
But then other engineers and managers have ignored such calls. I worked on a plant at ICI Mond in the late 1960s, where one of my colleagues installed an instrument, that said under some operating conditions, the plant could explode. The plant operation was immediately modified to avoid this condition. However the non-ICI designers of the plant saidthat no instrument could measure what we had found and refused to shut a similar plant in continental Europe.
They were wrong, not to do something which may have been important for safety.
The Juice Carton Spanner
I have a weak left hand due to a stroke and find opening the plastic cartons for things like Innocent smoothies, a little difficult. But I’m getting better and I had no trouble a few minutes ago. However, there must be many others who do, as perhaps their hands are worse than mine because of arthritis or missing fingers.
But all the caps are the same and it should be possible to create a small plastic ring spanner that mates with the cap perfectly. Companies like Innocent might even give them away free with an advert on them, as they’d only cost a few pence each to make.
There are still so many things that need inventing!
I always remember my father had a wonderful pair of round-jawed pliers, that were always being used to open difficult bottles at home. I’v never seen anything like them since.
BP’s Gulf Crisis
I’ve done a lot of interesting things in a long working life. One that might help BP is a type of reusable oil rig/platform, for which I did the calculations in about 1972. It was called a Balaena and the company was called Balaena Structures. It was based in Cambridge. I wonder what happened to the idea.
The Anonymous Widower 